The Foot-prints of the Creator

by Hugh Miller

In raising from its bed the large mass of strata which the gunpowder had loosened, on the surface of the solid stone, our young quarrier descried the ridged and furrowed ripple marks which the tide leaves upon every sandy shore, and he wondered what had become of the waves that had thus fretted the solid rock, and of what element they had been composed. His admiration was equally excited by a circular depression in the sandstone, “broken and flawed in every direction, as if it had been the bottom of a pool recently dried up, which had shrunk and split in the hardening.” And before the day closed, a series of large stones had rolled down from the clay, “all rounded and water-worn, as if they had been tossed in the sea or the bed of a river for hundreds of years.” Was the clay which enclosed them created on the rock upon which it lay? No workman ever manufactures a half-worn article!—were the ejaculations of the geologist at his alphabet.

Our author and his companions were soon removed to an easier wrought quarry, and one more pregnant with interest, which had been opened “in a lofty wall of cliffs that overhangs the northern shore of the Moray Frith.” Here the geology of the district exhibited itself in section.

“We see in one place the primary rock, with its veins of granite and quartz,—its dizzy precipices of gneiss, and its huge masses of hornblende; we find the secondary rock in another, with its bed of sandstone and shale,—its spars, its clays, and its nodular limestones. We discover the still little known but highly interesting fossils of the Old Red Sandstone in one deposition; we find the beautifully preserved shells and lignites of the lias in another. There are the remains of two several creations at once before us. The shore, too, is heaped with rolled fragments of almost every variety of rock,—basalts, ironstones, hypersthenes, porphyries, bituminous shales, and micaceous schists. In short, the young geologist, had he all Europe before him, could hardly choose for himself a better field. I had, however, no one to tell me so at the time, for geology had not yet travelled so far north; and so, without guide or vocabulary, I had to grope my way as I best might, and find out all its wonders for myself. But so slow was the process, and so much was I a seeker in the dark, that the facts contained in these few sentences were the patient gatherings of years.”—Old Red Sandstone, pp. 9, 10.

In this rich field of inquiry, our author encountered, almost daily, new objects of wonder and instruction. In one nodular mass of limestone he found the beautiful ammonite, like one of the finely sculptured volutes of an Ionic capital. Within others, fish-scales and bivalve shells; and in the centre of another he detected a piece of decayed wood. Upon quitting the quarry for the building upon which the workmen were to be employed, the workmen received half a holiday, and our young philosopher devoted this valuable interval to search for certain curiously shaped stones, which one of the quarriers told him resembled the heads of boarding-pikes, and which, under the name of thunder-bolts, were held to be a sovereign remedy for cattle that had been bewitched. On the shore two miles off, where he expected these remarkable bodies, he found deposits quite different either from the sandstone cliffs or the primary rocks further to the west. They consisted of “thin strata of limestone, alternating with thicker beds of a black slaty substance,” which burned with a bright flame and a bituminous odor. Though only the eighth part of an inch thick, each layer contained thousands of fossils peculiar to the lias,—scallops and gryphites, ammonites, twigs and leaves of plants, cones of pine, pieces of charcoal, and scales of fishes,—the impressions being of a chalky whiteness, contrasting strikingly with their black bituminous lair. Among these fragments of animal and vegetable life, he at last detected his thunder-bolt in the form of a Belemnite, the remains of a kind of cuttle-fish long since extinct.

In the exercise of his profession, which “was a wandering one,” our author advanced steadily, though slowly and surely, in his geological acquirements.

“I remember,” says he, “passing direct on one occasion from the wild western coast of Ross-shire, where the Old Red Sandstone leans at a high angle against the prevailing quartz rock of the district, to where, on the southern skirts of Mid-Lothian, the mountain limestone rises amid the coal. I have resided one season on a raised beach on the Moray Frith. I have spent the season immediately following amid the ancient granites and contorted schists of the central Highlands. In the north, I have laid open by thousands the shells and lignites of the Oolite; in the south, I have disinterred from their matrices of stone or of shale the huge reeds and tree ferns of the carboniferous period.... In the north, there occurs a vast gap in the scale. The Lias leans unconformably against the Old Red Sandstone; there is no mountain limestone, no coal measures, none of the New Red Marls or Sandstones. There are at least three entire systems omitted. But the upper portion of the scale is well-nigh complete. In one locality we may pass from the Lower to the Upper Lias, in another from the Inferior to the Great Oolite, and onward to the Oxford Clay and the Coral Rag. We may explore in a third locality beds identical in their organisms with the Wealden of Sussex. In a fourth, we find the flints and fossils of the chalk. The lower part of the scale is also well-nigh complete. The Old Red Sandstone is amply developed in Moray, Caithness, and Ross, and the Grauwacke very extensively in Banffshire. But to acquaint one’s self with the three missing formations,—to complete one’s knowledge of the entire scale, by filling up the hiatus,—it is necessary to remove to the south. The geology of the Lothians is the geology of at least two thirds of the gap, and perhaps a little more;—the geology of Arran wants only a few of the upper beds of the New Red Sandstone to fill it entirely.”—Old Red Sandstone, pp. 13-17.

After having spent nearly fifteen years in the profession of a stone-mason, Mr. Miller was promoted to a position more suited to his genius. When a bank was established in his native town of Cromarty, he received the appointment of accountant, and he was thus employed, for five years, in keeping ledgers and discounting bills. When the contest in the Church of Scotland had come to a close, by the decision of the House of Lords in the Auchterurder Case, Mr. Miller’s celebrated letter to Lord Brougham attracted the particular attention of the party which was about to leave the Establishment, and he was selected as the most competent person to conduct the Witness newspaper, the principal metropolitan organ of the Free Church. The great success which this journal has met with is owing, doubtless, to the fine articles, political, ecclesiastical, and geological, which Mr. Miller has written for it. In the few leisure hours which so engrossing an occupation has allowed him to enjoy, he has devoted himself to the ardent prosecution of scientific inquiries; and we trust the time is not far distant when the liberality of his country, to which he has done so much honor, will allow him to give his whole time to the prosecution of science.

Geologists of high character had believed that the Old Red Sandstone was defective in organic remains; and it was not till after ten years’ acquaintance with it that Mr. Miller discovered it to be richly fossiliferous. The labors of other ten years were required to assign to its fossils their exact place in the scale.

Among the fossils discovered by our author, the Pterichthys or winged fish is doubtless the most remarkable. He had disinterred it so early as 1831, but it was only in 1838 that he “introduced it to the acquaintance of geologists.” It was not till 1831 that Mr. Miller began to receive assistance in his studies from without. In the appendix to Messrs. Anderson of Inverness’s admirable Guide to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, which “he perused with intense interest,” he found the most important information respecting the geology of the North of Scotland; and during a correspondence with the accomplished authors of that work, many of his views were developed, and his difficulties removed. In 1838, he communicated to Dr. Malcolmson of Madras, then in Paris, a drawing and description of the Pterichthys. His letter was submitted to Agassiz, and subsequently a restored drawing was communicated to the Elgin Scientific Society. The great naturalist, as well as the members of the provincial society, were surprised at the new form of life which Mr. Miller had disclosed, and some of them, no doubt, regarded it with a sceptical eye. “Not many months after, however, a true bona fide Pterichthys was turned up in one of the newly-discovered beds of Nairnshire.” In his last visit to Scotland, Agassiz found six species of the Pterichthys, three of which, and the wings of a fourth, were in Mr. Miller’s collection.

This remarkable animal has less resemblance than any other fossil of the Old Red Sandstone to anything that now exists. When first brought to view by the single blow of a hammer, there appeared on a ground of light-colored limestone the effigy of a creature, fashioned apparently out of jet, with a body covered with plates, two powerful looking arms articulated at the shoulders, a head as entirely lost in the trunk as that of the ray, (or skate,) and a long angular tail, equal in length to a third of the entire figure. Its general resemblance is to the letter T,—the upper part of the vertical line being swelled out, and the lower part ending in an angular point, the two horizontal portions being, in the opinion of Agassiz, organs of locomotion. To this remarkable fossil M. Agassiz has given the appropriate name of Pterichthys Milleri. An account of it, accompanied with two fine specimens, was communicated to the Geological Section of the British Association at Glasgow, in September, 1840; and the most ample details, with accurate drawings, were afterwards published, in 1841, in Mr. Miller’s first work, The Old Red Sandstone, which was dedicated to Sir Roderick Murchison, who was born on the Old Red Sandstone of the North, in the same district as Mr. Miller, and whose great acquirements and distinguished labors are known all over the world among scientific men. This admirable work has already passed through three editions. From the originality and accuracy of its descriptions, and the importance of the researches which it contains, it has obtained for its author a high reputation among geologists; while from the elegance and purity of its style, and the force and liveliness of its illustrations, it has received the highest praise from its more general readers.[1]